Company fixes faulty batteries on Corpus Christi parking meters on its own dime

STEVEN ALFORD/CALLER-TIMES
Parking Enforcement Officer Rene Garcia installs new credit card-reading meters Tuesday along Carancahua Street. This week, parking officials will install 300 new meters with higher fees, which were approved last August by the City Council.

CORPUS CHRISTI - If you wanted to dispute a citation because, say, it was issued on a meter that was broken, you couldn’t legally park in the spot closest to the Parking Services building on Leopard Street last week — because the meter was broken.

Near the six-month anniversary of the city’s installation of 300 new solar-charged credit and debit card-reading parking meters, about 30 stopped working.

The batteries died on about 10 percent of the meters on various streets and locations throughout downtown and uptown in a period of about two weeks, Parking Control Director Marc Denson said. But the company the city contracts with is replacing the batteries for free, and there is no reason to believe there will be problems moving forward, he said.

“It’s been over the past couple weeks we started really having a problem. We had a little grouping of them right at six months — about 30 of them went out — sometimes one or two in a day, sometimes four,” Denson said. “Those were replaced, the company flew in and replaced them; they’ve been very good at really handling this.”

Duncan Solutions, the California-based company, sent an engineer to Corpus Christi two weeks ago with 30 new batteries. Calls and emails to Duncan Solutions were not returned Tuesday.

After the initial replacements, the engineer told Denson to keep an eye on other meters, and if many more fail, all 300 will be replaced at no cost to the city.

“I was very impressed ... that’s a pretty expensive replacement cost for batteries,” Denson said. “I appreciate when a vendor goes to that extreme, that’s a good business relationship between a vendor and the city.”

He’s also particularly concerned with keeping that other important relationship in good standing — the one between motorists and the city. He said every complaint about invalid tickets is examined, as are the meters that generated the ticket. The city can find out within minutes if a meter’s battery is dying or dead. For a nonoperational meter, the employees who handle ticket disputes and hearings have been instructed to throw out the ticket, Denson said. If a meter comes up below a certain voltage and it could potentially malfunction, the tie goes to the motorist.

“We don’t want to take any chance on a citizen ever getting an invalid ticket; we don’t ever want to be accused of writing a citation we shouldn’t write,” Denson said. “If we see that indication, where it could have malfunctioned, we just accept that it did malfunction.”

Denson said employees test meters and will examine if someone is simply trying to get out of a fine.

“If it’s not working and you’ve got a citation, it’s getting dismissed,” Denson said. “If it’s a weak battery, we’ll know — so you can’t fake us out, so you can’t take advantage of us.”

Denson said that some of the batteries died within a few weeks of being delivered, and others have since gone out. The issue, he said, is that Duncan Solutions is getting the batteries from a warehouse, and there is no way of knowing whether those batteries have been sitting on a shelf for six months before being installed. Still, he maintains that there are fewer battery malfunctions with the solar-powered types installed than the previous batteries, when the department could field as many as 20 calls in a day from motorists saying they were improperly fined for meters that didn’t work.